As far as alter, in 1981, before I became a programmer, I asked my
Cobol Programmer friend if there was anything you could put in a
program that would get you fired. He said yes, the alter statement :-).
In my 3 semesters of Cobol, I never once used the Alter statement.
[...]
I was very proud of using an ALTER GOTO in my first program in my 8
week COBOL training course. Now I cringe every time I think about it!
Before the course, I was fluent in FORTRAN IV and had programmed in
ALGOL-68. So I was an experienced programmer.
In what I see now as truly prescient of the early 80's U of BC CS
department, algol-68, snobol, cobol, B, APL and half a dozen others I've
complete forgoten each got a week with the same Towers of Hanoi task. I
can only assume the powers saw the impending dump-heap relegation of the
lot of them. The counter argument was that the major project was done PL/1.
